Re: debian 2.1r3 needed and release team coordination
On Sun, Apr 04, 1999 at 05:05:11PM -0400, James R. Van Zandt wrote:
>
>
> Turbo Fredriksson <turbo@debian.org> writes:
> >I've been trying to do a 'proper' boot disk WITH a 2.2 kernel on it.
> ...
> >I see two options:
> >
> > 1, One boot disk and one root disk.
>
> I favor this option for installation. The kernel will continue to
> grow. 1.44 M floppies do not.
Soon our huge "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-compiled-in" kernel won't
fit on a floppy and we'll have to redesign the whole thing. Let's start
now that we have some time.
The way our current kernel is built was the only way to go before
initrd support appeared, but initrd has been with us for a long time,
so I think it's time for us to redesign our kernel packages and
boot-floppies to use it, by building as much as possible as modules
and loading the ones that the user needs from an initrd at boot time.
That will give the user a smaller kernel, that loads faster and uses less
memory, and probably will fit his needs without having to recompile.
That also helps while building different rescue disks. Just change the
set of modules on the initrd and there you are. No need for a bazillion
different "sort-of-official" kernels on the boot floppies (heck, we don't
even have the "sort-of-official" tecra kernel on the distribution yet).
About floppy sizes... I've been thinking again about building bigger
floppy images for CD-ROM based installations (but not just for them...
superdisks and zip disks would benefit also). With the right
implementation we may use the same code for "floppy based" installations
and "big-media based" installations.
--
Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
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